Rob Goodspeed's blog

Category: Urbanism and Planning

Although I have been interested in scenario planning methodologies for several years, to date I have not published much scholarly work on the topic. As my first foray into the field, I recently completed a working paper for the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy on how scenario planning should be evaluated. Here’s the abstract: Professionals […]

The Geographic Information Science and Technology (GIS&T) Body of Knowledge has quickly become an essential reference for the GIS field. Compiled by the University Consortium of GIS, the academic GIS network, the original GIS&T Body of Knowledge was published as a book in 2006, and featured high-quality, peer-reviewed chapters on a wide range of GIS […]

How can a region create a shared technical infrastructure for planning? In order to find out, together with a student research assistant Cassie Hackel, I conducted an exploratory study of an effort to build such a system in Southern California. Here is the abstract of the paper which resulted from our research project: Although planning […]

I contributed a chapter to the newly-released book, Big Data for Regional Science (eds. Laurie A. Schintler, Zhenhua Chen), on new methods for conducting urban visual preferences research. Here’s an excerpt from the introduction: Aesthetic preferences for landscapes have been studied by researchers in many fields, given the importance of the issue to human well-being, […]

Together with collaborators at the UM School of Information, I am helping organize another Urban Informatics Unconference this fall, to be held from noon-5pm on Friday, October 20th. Here’s some more information: Urban informatics is an interdisciplinary field of research and practice that uses information technology for the analysis, management, planning, design, inhabitation, and usability […]

I took the opportunity to consider how technology is transforming the relationship between community and urban place in a recent contribution to the Symposium section of the journal City & Community. Here is the abstract: The sources of big data of most interest to urban social researchers arise from the adoption of digital information and communications technologies […]